Operative Blog

The world of creative in online advertising is constantly evolving. It seems that every month we’re reading about new types of creative that can be implemented on a publisher’s web site. While many still use plain images to do their advertising (and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that!), we are beginning to see that advertiser’s want to directly engage the user…and when they do, it leads to quantifiable results.

While Flash® is still considered ‘Rich Media’ by many, it is quickly becoming ‘standard’ creative in this day and age. Flash® ads are now so common that even as a user myself, I do not feel that it captivates my attention like many of the newer brands of creative – ads such as push-downs, interstitials, and floating ads, while sometimes annoying to the user, also present a better opportunity to capture the user’s attention.

So if you are a publisher and want to get involved in the freshest types of rich media, here are 3 things to know so that you aren’t caught off-guard by the newest creative types.

1. Rich Media Vendors are the way to go.

If you’ve yet to take a dive into the world of rich media, know that there are specialists out there whose core competency is building and serving high-end rich media. Providers such as Pointroll, Media Mind(formerly Eyeblaster) and Eyewonder specialize in this type of work, and can handle any questions you may have about rich media as well as assist you and your advertiser in the creation of your product. Operative has developed partnerships with several of these vendors as well- reach out to us if you would like an introduction!

2. Rich Media creative is served differently than standard creative.

Standard ads are served through an ad tag on your website. These ad tags contain a specific size and directly correlate to a specific position on your page. There is very little complexity here. When delving into a high-end rich media creative, the equation changes. Take a “pushdown” for instance:  This ad is meant to load as a standard ad, but when you mouse over it, it “pushes” the content of your page down as the ad expands to a greater size. To create this type of movement, the code within the ad interacts with the code on your web page, creating this action. Obviously this can be a complicated process, which leads us to…

3. There will be some frustrations!

Most publishers can attest to the struggles obtaining creative in time for an on-time campaign launch. When using rich media, the struggle may increase. As a publisher, if you know you are going to be using rich media, it is best to plan for it! Rich media creative often require extensive testing in a custom set-up test environment (make sure you have one!) before setting the creative live to your actual web page. These ads often do not work the way you expect them to on the first try, so it’s imperative to test them before launch. This, of course, means you’ll need the creative in your hands well before the launch- so make sure you plan ahead for this when scheduling campaigns and working with a creative developer!

Diving head-first into the world of rich media is an exciting step for every publisher…and can lead to increased revenue. But know that a lot of work, and often times, a lot of patience is a part of the package! All in all however, employing rich media on your site can be a tremendous benefit to both you (higher CPMs), and your advertisers (more customers)!

For more information, please click here.

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Blogged by Christopher Lane, Operations Manager

Operative provides outsourced Ad Operations for both agencies and publishers across the globe. Chris Lane is one of Operative’s senior technical and tactical experts for all things Publisher, providing advice to publisher clients on a variety of subject matters including campaign performance to troubleshooting and product optimization.

No one sets out with a business model that requires giving money back for delivering valuable products.  Yet, that’s effectively what most publishers are doing with Makegoods and over-delivery. Some have acknowledged the seriousness of the issue and have developed a patchwork of tools in Excel to do a better job of campaign management.  However, these are rarely forward looking or timely to respond in business real-time to a poorly performing campaign.

There are many reasons for campaigns to under perform: the product was oversold, the forecast was wrong, trafficking errors were not caught, and, everyone’s favorite, ad serving delivery discrepancies. How serious is this issue? How about at least $400m annually in the US! That’s assuming just 5% of IAB’s estimate for display ad revenue ($3.8B for 1H09) is disputed.  Our anecdotal discussions with publishers indicate that the number may be even higher.

The good news is that much of the loss can be mitigated by actively managing campaigns, early and frequently.  Automation can easily replace the manual routine that most publishers find themselves in: log into third party ad server, export report, pull it into Excel, reconcile with primary ad server data; repeat for every third party ad server; repeat as many times a month as you can – realistically, just once. Oh by the way, account for changed passwords, misaligned data and just try to get the data right, forget about analysis.

For those of you stuck in this resource-sucking treadmill, we have good news.

Today we are announcing Operative.One Campaign360, a product that makes it easy for publishers to centrally manage and proactively monitor campaigns.  It improves virtually every step of the campaign management process:

• “lights out” integration and collection of data from primary and third-party ad server
• Automatic reconciliation of primary and third party line items
• A simple, grid-based UI for manual reconciliation and overrides
• Robust analysis with pre-built graphs and reports for common tasks such as delivery discrepancy, pacing, top 10/bottom 10 campaigns

All the information that you need to do campaign management and billing is in one place, keeping you from having to do hours of leg work to collect the data, reconcile it, and create reports.

In other words, the product does all the heavy lifting and you focus on making sure that you get all the revenue that your sales team worked hard to book.

Based on our experience of 10 years working with publishers, we are really excited about the potential this product has in improving publisher operations. Learn more about the campaign management and discrepencies in our white paper, Making Peace with Discrepancies: Six Steps You Can Take to Proactively Manage Them, learn more about the product and contact us .

When you consider their importance, it seems surprising that ad tags aren’t shown more love by publishers.  They should be. If a site is properly tagged, it can generate far more revenue than it otherwise would.   Simply put, every subpar ad tag causes a publisher to lose potential revenue.  Here’s why:

Communication between a website and an ad server

Ads that command the highest CPM are those that are best targeted to an audience.  I’m sure Nike, Vonage or any other advertiser will pay more for a campaign that delivers results in the form of clicks and actions and then conversion. The best way for a publisher to ensure that its audience is attracted to the ads being displayed is to use the site content to gauge the interest of each visitor. For sites that require user registration, additional information, such as age and gender, may also be available.

All of this valuable information is useless, however, if it doesn’t make it into the ad server.  Building an advanced ad tag that passes along all relevant information allows the ad server to present the most appropriate ad to the user. Considering that the ad tag is the main source of communication between a website and an ad server, it makes sense that a suitable ad tag is needed in order for the server to perform most effectively.

My content is the best

We all know that not all content is created equal.  What is truly helpful is to be able to identify which content performs best. Knowing the patterns of visitors on a website allows sales teams to best match campaigns to content. For example, ads that appear on pages featuring content that engrosses visitors, such as news articles and movie clips, may not receive as many clicks as those on pages whose content is of a more general nature. The performance of low-click content makes it unsuitable for CPC campaigns.  When the content type is included in the site tag (ex: sect=news or sect=video), the publisher can then decide to exclude these sections from CPC campaigns and utilize them for branding campaigns, which do not require high click rates.  Rather than let the low click-through rate of those sections drag down the average performance of the site, the publisher is able to separate them out and sell the high-click content at a premium.  In this way, the publisher is able to best match content to advertisers and maximize revenue.

Trying to sell – Bump up the appeal

When a website is outfitted with site tags that take into account useful information – such as user details, page position, and site content – the sales team is able to sell more targeted campaigns at higher rates.  Being able to differentiate content allows for more flexibility when selling inventory.

Reports, Reports and more Reports!

Even after an ad serves, an ad tag’s job is not done.  Detailed ad tags are able to enhance reporting capabilities and make delivery reports more robust.  The information contained in the reports is useful to both advertisers and publishers.

Advertisers love detailed reports because they provide the advertiser with the ability to more effectively optimize a campaign.  Many long term campaigns rely on optimization to attain the results that an advertiser is seeking.  Publishers that offer detailed reporting are attractive to advertisers because they are more in control of how their money is being spent.

Consider this scenario:  A publisher  MYSAMPLETAG.COM (fake name) with advanced ad tags is able to target certain ads to a website that features several sections, each with different user demographics.  When the advertiser (lets say  TOYSRUS) examines the detailed delivery report, they notice that creative featuring a puppy performed particularly well on a section of children’s content whose visitors are between the ages of 6 and 11. Armed with this information, the TOYSRUS chooses to run the puppy creative at a higher rotation in that section, increasing the click rate of the campaign. The robust reporting that sophisticated ad tags can offer allows for greater campaign optimization and can enhance the performance of the website.

Let me tell you …

A very good example of the company  that certainly knows the value of an ad tag is NBC Universal’s Local Integrated Media.  Their websites span many different domains and markets and they cater to the tastes of many different audiences. Through their systematic and organized site tags, they are able to provide detailed information which enables them to make the most of the content that they produce.   Their careful attention to their ad tags has helped them make their complex network manageable.

Net-Net

Properly tagging a website is an investment that is well worth making. The returns to be gained from targeted selling and advanced reporting are significant for publishers and should not be overlooked. Targeted selling allows publishers to properly match advertisers to content, ensuring high performance that is valuable to advertisers.  Additionally, advanced reporting allows for improved campaign optimization and boosts performance even more. Every site that is not adequately tagged is not living up to its full potential.

**If you are interested in retagging your web site, or would like to learn more about working with an Operative re-tagging strategy consultant, please contact Greg Carr at 212.206.4762 or gcarr@operative.com.

…they could all force publishers to change the way they sell and operate in the near future.

Have you ever had one of those digital media moments where you thought, “cmon, really?!”  Well, on Monday morning I attended Digiday at the W Hotel in NYC and for a moment, thought exactly that… for a minute.  I think it was brought up numerous times that it’s no longer appropriate to call your inventory sold and unsold, but more like ‘reserved and non-reserved’ as Darren Herman put it.  I thought to myself, hmmm, ok, let’s go with that…it sounds better than remnant for sure…but then later that day, it was then proclaimed ‘premium and sub-premium’…I guess because ‘non-premium’ sounds too much like a fake Louis Vuitton handbag sold on 5th Avenue next to the hot dog vendor – you might buy one, but you’ll feel a little icky after.

Believe it or not, all this renaming and debating over what to call unused inventory went on all morning.  All of a sudden, these silly proclamations started to make me think.  If people are spending all this effort debating over what a specific category is called, there must be a disturbance in the force; the growth of this ‘sub-premium’ inventory is growing exponentially.  Jason Kelly from Time, Inc agrees that with “…the growth of  Twitter and other social media, non-premium inventory is growing at a rapid pace, which also means finding premium inventory is getting harder.”  He also added that “non premium display has great opportunity for growth.” 

So as sub-premium inventory grows at such a rapid pace, the dynamic of how advertisers interact with consumers is changes along with it. 

French children are told a story in which they imagine having a pond with water lily leaves floating on the surface.  The lily population doubles in size every day and, if left unchecked, will smother the pond in 30 days, killing all the other living things in the water.  Could the growth of sub-premium inventory threaten publishers ability to compete in the future?  The answer is yes - if you don’t take action.  Here are some thoughts on how agencies are looking to innovate and some action items publishers can take to keep competitive in this newly evolving landscape.

1. Agencies are Buying Audience:  You may say, “duh” to that, but with all the impressions available on the Internet,  coupled with new technologies, there are more and more ways for agencies to buy audiences.  Darren Herman, who runs digital media at the Media Kitchen and is also President of Varick Media Management, talked about their own data initiatives and is working with 27 different data providers to mine data for audience segments. 

2. I also traded some emails with Steve Katelman from OMD and when I asked him what the next big initiatives were for agencies, he said “It’s all about audiences and the evolution of real time bidding.”  These activities signal that agencies are pushing the envelope and taking media buying to the next level since brands are getting smarter about which agencies they work with. 

3. To make things even more interesting, GroupM decided to go against the IAB initiatives for Ts and Cs by claiming ownership of data it collects.  According to GroupM’s COO, John Montgomery, this is a way to “…protect the confidentiality of our clients’ campaign data and information.”  One does wonder if this becomes a trend, how it could create a dynamic  of publishers competing against their own customers OR new price pressures down the road.

So now what?

As a publisher, you need to start to understand your audience.  Quantcast is  great way to take a first step at understanding the segments you can offer – but that won’t be enough.  Taking action on that data and integrating it into your product catalog so it’s easily findable by your ad sales team, will ensure you are ready to sell the way agencies want to buy. Now, that’scompetitive advantage.  This was echoed at Digiday by Janet Balis, President of Digital Media Strategies, who spoke on the importance of, at the very least, keeping an up to date “product catalog and sound inventory management strategy” as the industry looks towards more advanced ways to reach consumers.

Industry vet and pal of mine, Nick Johnson from NBCU mentioned that “mining data and looking for specific audience segments is a big focus for us…we are in the business of unlocking data to create value for our clients and their clients.”  In order to do this, Nick added, “You need to operate more efficiently and look for places in your business that don’t scale and fix them.”  If you want to elevate your game, you need to fix the basic data fragmentation issues in order to solve for the future.

Even if you can get your house in order for this audience revolution, there is still a miss-match in terms of how you set up your resources.  Currently, “50% of ad ops time is focused on 15% of the revenue,” says Josh Wetzelfrom Pubmatic.  Basically, this means that in addition to getting your data in order, you may have to find ways to free up your ad ops resources to stay focused on big ticket integrations and less on the more repeatable, low CPM, ‘sub-premium’ tasks.

I look forward to your comments.

Lorne